Quotes About Imagination

Il libro dovrebb'essere la controparte scritta del mondo non scritto; la sua materia dovrebbe essere ciò che non c'è né potrà esserci se non quando sarà scritto, ma di cui ciò che c'è sente oscuramente il vuoto nella propria incompletezza.

A poor writer is one who names rather than represents.

What if it were as they say? If, while I believe I am writing in fun, what I write were really dictated by the extraterrestrials?

Chi comanda al racconto non è la voce: è l'orecchio

Your reading is no longer solitary: you think of the Other Reader, who, at this same moment, is also opening the book; and there, the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived, the continuation of your story with her, or better still, the beginning of a possible story.

The trouble is that once upon a time they all began like that, all novels. There was somebody who went along a lonely street and saw something that attracted his attention, something that seemed to conceal a mystery, or a premonition; then he asked for explanations and they told him a long story…

if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines […], a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first model.

His memory, if he could patiently reconstruct the hours he passed, second by second, promised him boundless Edens.

Eu chegara ao limiar da adolescência e ainda me ocultava entre as raízes das grandes árvores do bosque para me contar histórias. Uma agulha de pinheiro podia representar para mim um cavaleiro ou uma dama ou um bufão; movimentava-a diante de meus olhos e me exaltava em relatos intermináveis. Depois ficava com vergonha dessas fantasias e fugia.

But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. "I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read…" she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?

l'arte di scriver storie sta nel saper tirare fuori da quel nulla che si è capito della vita tutto il resto. ma finita la pagina si riprende la vita e ci s'accorge che quel che si sapeva è proprio un nulla.

Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms.

Ogni vita è un enciclopedia, una biblioteca, un campionario di stili, dove tutto può essere continuamente rimescolato e riordinato in tutti i modi possibili

Will I ever be able to say, "Today it writes," just like "Today it rains," "Today it is windy"?

The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.

The thing I'd like most in the world," I said to her, since at this point I might as well go on talking with her, "is to make clocks run backward." The woman gives some ordinary answer, such as, "You only have to move the hands." "No, with thought, by concentrating until I force time back," I say.

If I knew how to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects," I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subject and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognize my moods in the motionless suffering of things. Miss

Cosimo si gettò nel folto: avrebbe voluto che fosse mille volte più folto, una valanga di foglie e rami e spini e caprifogli e capelveneri da affondarci e sprofondarci e solo dopo essercisi del tutto sommerso cominciare a capire se era felice o folle di paura.

La fantasia è una specie di macchina elettronica che tiene conto di tutte le combinazioni possibili e sceglie quelle che rispondono ad un fine, o che semplicemente sono le più interessanti, piacevoli, divertenti.

When I got here my first thought was: Maybe I achieved such an effort with my thoughts that time has made a complete revolution; here I am at the station from which I left on my first journey, it has remained as it was then, without any change. All the lives that I could have led begin here; there is the girl who could have been my girl and wasn't, with the same eyes, the same hair...

Tutto l'immaginabile può essere sognato ma anche il sogno più inatteso è un rebus che nasconde un desiderio, oppure il suo rovescio, una paura. Le città come i sogni sono costruite di desideri e di paure, anche se il filo del loro discorso è segreto, le loro regole assurde, le prospettive ingannevoli, e ogni cosa ne nasconde un'altra.

She's there every day,' the writer says. 'Every time I'm about to sit down at my desk I feel the need to look at her. Who knows what she's reading? I know it isn't a book of mine, and instinctively I suffer at the thought, I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads. I never tire of watching her: she seems to live in a sphere suspended in another time and another space.

I had seen much more than that, I had visited the world of the things that could have been, and I couldn't drive it from my mind. And I had known the beauty kept prisoner in the heart of that world, the beauty lost for me and for all of us, and I had fallen in love with it.

La letteratura vive solo se si pone degli obbiettivi smisurati, anche al di là d'ogni possibilità di realizzazione.